AP US Birrell Enduring Vision Term 2 Final IDS + AP US History CH 12 Birrell - ch 19

Carlisle Indian School

"Kill the Indian, save the man." Army officer Richard H. Pratt founded this in Pennsylvania to give Indians the skills and cultural attitudes necessary to succeed in American society. Young Indians who attended this encountered teachers with no respect for traditional Indian culture. Reeducation represented as determined an assault on the Native American world as the slaughter of the buffalo, the seizure of hunting land, and military repression.

Zachary Taylor

"Old Rough and Ready." Polk ordered American troops under this general during the pre-Mexican War to the edge of the disputed territory. The general deployed his army at Corpus Christi in territory still claimed by Mexico. Defeated a large Mexican army at the Battle of Buena Vista. Elected Pres from Whig party in Election of 1848.

William F. Cody

Also known as Buffalo Bill, he killed 4,300 buffalo in only eight months during 1867-1868 to provide food for Union Pacific crews. He started his own Wild West show in 1883. He also presented mock "battles" between army scouts and Indians, morality dramas of good versus evil.

California gold rush

An American carpenter discovered gold while building a sawmill in the foothills of CA's Sierra Nevada. 44,000 emigrants to CA in 1850. This made the issue of slavery in the West an immediate, practical concern.

Samuel Gompers

An English immigrant cigar maker who headed the AFL from its formation until his death. He argued labor had to harness the bargaining power of skilled workers.

Terence V Powderly

An Irish Catholic who became the Knights' of Labor's head and skyrocketed membership by bringing in Catholics. He condemned strikes and advocated temperance and offered membership to both blacks and women.

Greenbacks

When neither additional taxes nor war bond sales produced enough revenue for the Civil War, President Lincoln authorized the issue of $150 million in this paper money. To bolster the value, Union officials made these acceptable in payment of most public and private debts.

Southern Code of Honor

An extraordinary sensitivity to one's reputation, a belief that one's self-esteem depends on the judgement of others ; The southern code of honor was based upon a great respect for ones reputation. It is often contrasted with the Northern emphasis on internal character and conscience. Under the honor culture of the south even the slightest intentional insult could provoke an intense over reaction; the means of settling disputes under the honor culture was the duel which had it's own rules of conduct

Henry Clay's Omnibus Bill

1850: (1) the admission of California as a free state; (2) the division of the remainder of the Mexican cession into two territories, NM and UT, without fed. restrictions on slavery; (3) the settlement of the TX-NM boundary dispute on terms favorable to NM; (4) Federal govn. would assume TX's large public debt; (5) abolition of slave trade in DC; and (6) a more effective fugitive slave law

Stephen A Douglas

Democratic senator of Illinois and creator of Kansas-Nebraska Act. His politics were founded on his conviction that most Americans would support popular sovereignty as the fastest and lease controversial way to achieve national expansion. His self assurance blinded him to rising northern sentiment for free soil. The "little giant," the personification of the Democratic party in the West.

Homestead Act

1862, it offered 160 acres of free land to any individual who paid a $10 registration fee, lived on the land for five years, and cultivated and improved it. Only one-third of the native-stock settlers had farmed before migrating. It attracted immigrants from the British Isles and other areas of Europe where good-quality land was prohibitively expensive.

Gadsden Purchase

Pres. Pierce's emissary negotiated the purchase of a strip of land south of the Gila river, an acquisition favored by advocates of a southern railroad route to the Pacific. Senate approved the treaty only after slashing 9,000 square miles from the purchase

The Alamo

4,000 of Santa Anna's men laid siege to San Antonio where 200 rebels had retreated into this abandoned mission. The defenders of it were overwhelmed by Mexican troops and under Santa Anna's orders, the Mexican army killed all of the defenders including the wounded.

Crittenden plan of compromise

A Moderate of Kentucky suggested compensation for owners of runaway slaves, repeal of northern person-liberty laws, a constitutional amendment to prohibit the federal government from interfering with slavery in southern states, and another amendment to restore the Missouri Compromise line. But in the face of adamant Republican opposition, the plan collapsed.

John Muir

A Scottish immigrant who had grown up in Wisconsin. He fell in love with the redwood forests of the Yosemite Valley, and for forty years he tramped the rugged mountains of the West. He struggled to experience the wilderness at is most elemental level. He became the late 19th century's most articulate publicist for wilderness protection. His campaign to preserve the wilderness contributed to the establishment of Yosemite National Park in 1890 and the creation two years later of the Sierra Club.

William T Sherman

A Union general who captured Atlanta which boosted southern morale and helped to reelect Lincoln. He then marched unimpeded across Georgia and into South Carolina and devastated the states. He used the tactic of total war. He destroyed everything that could aide the Confederacy.

Ulysses S Grant

A West Point graduate with a reputation for heavy drinking, and a failed farmer and businessman, who proved to be one of the Union's best leaders. Defeated Confederate forces as Shiloh.

Anaconda plan

A long-range Union strategy that called for the Union to blockade the southern coast and to thrust down the Mississippi River. In theory, sealing off and severing the Confederacy would make the South recognize the futility of secession. However, the lack of adequate ships and men to seize the Mississippi in 1861 prevented the implementation of this ambitious plan.

Henry George, Progress and Poverty

A newspaper editor and economic theorist, he proposed to solve the nation's uneven distribution of wealth through the "single tax." In his book he proposed that government tax the "unearned increment" that speculators reaped from rising land prices.

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

A newspaper editor, he turned to fiction to evoke visions of a harmonious industrialized society. In his book, his protagonist, Julian West, falls asleep in 1888 and awakens in 2000 to find a nation without poverty or strife, thanks to a centralized, state-run economy. The utopian novel resonated among middle-class Americans.

Nativism

Anti-immigrant. Many of these societies began as secret fraternal orders but developed political offshoots. Included Know Nothing party. An explosive mixture of fears and discontents fueled it.

Squatter sovereignty

Argument that Congress should let the question of slavery in territories be decided by the people who settled there. Idea came from Democratic nominee Lewis Cass. Later called popular sovereignty.

Proslavery Argument

Between 1830-1960 Southern States started composing several proslavery arguments. They argued that southern slaves were treated better that "wage slaves" of the north because they were clothed, fed. In addition, members of the southern clergy argued that slavery was not only compatible wth Christianity but also was adequate for practicing the Christian religion. Eventually the south's arguments held no water and the abolition of slavery came under President Abraham Lincoln

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

This outlawed trusts and any other contracts or combinations in restraint of trade and establishing both fines and jail time as penalties. Didn't define the term trust very well and wasn't very effective.

Battle of Antietam

Bloodiest day of the entire war with 24,000 casualties. Tactically, the battle was a draw, but strategically it constituted a major Union victory. Most important it proved Lincoln the occasion to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Union general was McClellan and Confederate general was Lee.

Scalawags and Carpetbaggers

C______________: many former Union soldiers who hoped to buy land, open factories, build railroads, or simply enjoy the warmer climate. They held almost one in three state offices. They recruited Black support through a patriotic society called the Union league. S_____________: white southerners who supported the Republicans who were mostly small farmers from the mountain regions of NC, GA, AL, and AR. They wanted to improve their economic position and cared little one way or the other about black suffrage. They held the most political offices during Reconstruction but proved the least stable element of the Republican coalition.

Emancipation Proclamation

Following the Battle of Antietam, it freed all slaves under rebel control. It effectively preempted any British or French move toward recognition of the Confederacy. By transforming the war into a struggle about slavery, Lincoln won wide support in Britain. Also enabled African-Americans to join the Union army.

Knights of Labor

Founded in 1869 by Philadelphia tailors as a secret society modeled on the Masonic order, they welcomed all wage earners; they excluded only bankers, physicians, lawyers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, and liquor dealers. They advocated equal pay for women, an end to child and convict labor, a graduated income tax, and cooperative employer-employee ownership of factories, mines, and other businesses.

Haymarket Bombing

Chicago police shot and killed four strikers at the McCormick Harvester plant. At a protest rally the next evening the city's square, someone threw a bomb from a nearby building, killing or fatally wounding seven policemen. In turn, the police fired wildly into the crowd and slew four demonstrators.

Trent affair

Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell sailed for Europe to lobby for recognition of an independent South, but their ship fell into Union hands. When the pair ended up as prisoners in Boston, British tempers exploded. Considering one war at a time quite enough, President Lincoln ordered Mason and Slidell released.

Compromise of 1877

Congress created a special electoral commission with 8 republicans and 7 democrats to resolve the conflict of the 1876 Election because each party claimed victory, and each accused the other of fraud. The commission gave the Republican Hayes the election by an 8-7 vote. Hayes said he would remove federal troops from all southern states so southerners promised to accept Hayes as president. Congress thus ratified Hayes's election.

John Brown

Connecticut-born abolitionist with an overpowering sense of divinely ordained mission. In late May, he led seven men, toward Pottawatomie Creek near Lawrence, Kansas. They shot to death one man associated with the Lecompton govn. and hacked four others to pieces with broadswords. He also seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia hoping to ignite a slave rebellion throughout the South. Federal troops overpowered the raiders, and this man, apprehended and convicted of treason, was hanged.

Tenure of Office Act

This prohibited President Johnson from removing civil officers without Senate consent. Its purpose was to protect Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical ally needed to enforce the Reconstruction acts. The presidents defiance of this drove moderate Republicans back into alliance with the Radicals.

Black codes

Every state passed these which guaranteed the freedmen some basic rights--marriage, ownership of property, the right to testify in court against other blacks-- but also harshly restricted freedmen's behavior. Some states established segregation, and most prohibited racial intermarriage, jury service by blacks, and court testimony by blacks against whites. Most harmful, black codes included economic restrictions to prevent blacks from leaving the plantation. Left freedmen no longer slaves but not really liberated.

John Wesley Powell

He chartered the Colorado River in 1869 and wrote eloquently about the region's towering rock formations adn thundering cataracts. His "Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States" no only recognized the awesome beauty of the Colorado River basin but also argued that settlers needed to adjust their expectations about the use of water int he dry western terrain.

Andrew Carnegie

He embodied the rags-to-riches dream. He was an immigrant at age 12. His first job was a bobbin boy in a textile mill. At 17 he was hired to be the secretary and personal telegrapher of Tom Scott, superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad's west division. Then he became head of it. He used vertical integration in his steel mill to achieve even greater efficiency. His steel controlled every phase of the industry. With his wealth he established foundations and donated more than $300 million for libraries, universities, and international-peace causes. His steel company became the world's largest industrial corporation.

Thomas Edison

He epitomized the inventive impulse. Largely self-educated he was born a salesman and self-promoter. First major invention was a stock-quotation printer. He also invented the phonograph, the light bulb, mimeograph, microphone, motion-picture camera and film, and the storage battery. Also created the Menlo Park laboratory, a model for industrial research. Also stole a lot of Nikola Tesla

Eugene V Debs

He led the American Railway Union in the Pullman car strike. He vowed "to strip the mask of hypocrisy from the pretended philanthropist and show him to the world as an oppressor labor." He was arrested because when the Union restrained the cars, some were carrying US mail and he refused to order its members back to work.

Daniel Webster

He spoke vividly in favor of compromise and chided the North for trying to "reenact the will of God" by excluding slavery from the Mexican cession. Part of the trio who had stood at the center of American political life since the War of 1812.

William H Seward

Prominent free-soiler of New York who sought to limit but not abolish slavery. He spoke of an "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and freedom. He enraged southerners by talking of a "higher law than the Constitution" -- namely, the will of God against the extension of slavery. He led the antislavery "Conscience" Whigs.

Helen Hunt Jackson

In "A Century of Dishonor" he, an easterner transplanted to Colorado, rallied public opinion against the government's record of broken treaties to help the Indians. He strongly supported the Dawes Act, because he wanted to relieve the native peoples' suffering but also believed in the innate superiority of white American culture.

Bible riots

In 1844 after a nativist political party won a handful of offices in Philly, fiery Protestant orators denounced "popery," and Protestant mobs put Catholic neighborhoods to the torch. By the time militia quelled these, 16 people were dead and 30 building burned to the ground. They illustrate both the interplay of nativism, religion, and politics and the way in which local issues shaped the immigrants' political loyalties.

Comstock Lode

In 1858 a prospecor stumbled on this, which was a ton of gold and silver along Nevada's Carson River, and in a few months later gold silver seekers found still more precious ore along Clear Creek, Colorado. It alone produced more than $300 million in gold and silver.

Interstate Commerce Act

In 1887, Congress passed this which established a new agency to investigate and oversee railroad operations. The commission did little to curb the railroads, but it did establish the principle of federal regulation of interstate transportation.

Oklahoma "Sooners"

In 1889 Congress transferred 2 million acres of unassigned Oklahoma land to the federal public domain. At noon on April 22, 1889, thousands of men, women, and children in buggies and wagons stampeded onto the new lands to stake out homesteads. These people had infiltrated the lands illegally and were already plowing.

Frederick Jackson Turner, "Frontier Thesis"

In 1893 a young historian delivered a lecture that declared that "the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." Although inaccurate, his linking of economic opportunity to the development of the West caught the popular imagination and created a new school of historians.

The Great Famine

In Ireland blight destroyed harvest after harvest of potatoes, virtually the only food of the peasantry, and triggered one of the most gruesome famines in history. It killed a million people. 1.8 million Irish migrated to the US in the decade after 1845.

Lecompton Constitution

In Kansas a constitutional convention dominated by proslavery delegates met and drew this up which protected the rights of slaveholders already residing in Kansas and provided for a referendum to decide whether to allow more slaves into the territory. Pres. Buchanan endorsed this.

Ostend Manifesto

In October of 1854 the American ambassadors to Great Britain, France, and Spain met in Belgium and called on the US to acquire Cuba by any means, including force. Pres. Pierce repudiated the manifesto.

Ku Klux Klan

In spring 1866 six young Confederate war veterans in Tennessee formed this social club, distinguished by elaborate rituals, hooded costumes, and secret passwords. By 1868 they had become a terrorist movement directed against potential Black voters. The sought to suppress black voting, to reestablish white supremacy, and to topple the Reconstruction governments. The pillowcase army

Ghost Dance

In this ritual the dancers moved in a circle, accelerating until they reached a trance in which they believed they saw visions of the future. Some dancers claimed special powers to kill non-Indian settlers, and many believed that the sacred Shirts they wore would protect them from harm. The spread of this movement among the Sioux in the Dakota Territory alarmed military authorities.

Standard Oil Trust

John D Rockefeller established this in 1882. Him and his associates persuaded stockholders of forty companies to exchange their stock for certificates of trust and then established a board of trustees to run all the companies. Within three years this had consolidated crude-oil buying throughout its member firms and cut the number of refineries by half.

George B McClellan

Lincoln appointed this general to replace McDowell as commander of the Union's Army of the Potomac. He transformed a ragtag mob into a disciplined fighting force. Led the Peninsula Campaign. Union general for the Battle of Antietam.

The Dawes Severalty Act

Made Indians U.S. citizens. This aimed at reforming the "weakness" of Indian life--the absence of private property and the nomadic tradition--by forcing Indians to be farmers and landowners. It emphasized the treatment of Indians as individuals instead of as members of tribes, and called for the breakup of reservations. Each head of an Indian family who accepted the law would receive 160 acres of land for farming or 320 for grazing. To prevent bad people from getting the land, the government would hold the property of each tribal member in trust for 25 years.

Yellow dog contracts

Many employers required workers to sign these in which they promised not to strike or join a union.

The border slave states

Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri. By holding these slave states in the Union, Lincoln kept open his lines to the free states and gained access to the river systems in Kentucky and Missouri that led into the heart of the Confederacy.

Peninsula Campaign

McClellan decided to go around the southerners by transporting his troops down the Chesapeake Bay to the tip of the peninsula formed. At first it unfolded smoothly, but after luring the Confederacy to the brink of defeat, he hesitated, refusing to launch the final attack without the reinforcements he expected. In that time, Lee took the offensive attacking the much larger Union forces in the Seven Days' Battles. Lincoln ordered McClellan to call off the campaign and return to Washington.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Mexico ceded Texas with the Rio Grande boundary, New Mexico, and California to the US; from the Mexican cession would come the states of NM, CA, NV, UT, AZ, CO, and WY. In exchange the US paid Mexico $15 million.

New York City draft riots

Mobs of Irish working-class men and women roamed the streets for four days until federal troops suppressed them. The Irish loathed the idea of being drafted to fight a war on behalf of slaves who, once freed, might compete with them for jobs. They also bitterly resented a draft law that allowed the rich to purchase substitutes. The rioters lynched at least a dozen blacks, injured hundreds more, and burned draft offices and the homes of wealthy Republicans.

"Cotton diplomacy"

Neither Britain nor France ever recognized the Confederacy as a nation. Southerners had badly overestimated the leverage of this, exaggerating the impact of their threats to withhold raw cotton supplies.

Wade-Davis bill

Provided that a military government would rule each former Confederate state and that at least one-half of the eligible voters would have to swear allegiance before they could choose a convection to repeal secession and abolish slavery. In addition, to qualify as a voter or a delegate, a southerner would have to take the "ironclad" oath, swearing that he had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy. Pocket vetoed by Lincoln

Wounded Knee

On December 29, 1890 the 7th Calvary began rounding up 350 starving Sioux in South Dakota. When several Indians refused to surrender, the soldiers retaliated with rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannons, and within a short time as many as 300 Indians, including infants, lay dead. As the frozen corpses were being dumped into mass graves, a generation of Indian-white conflict on the Great Plains shuddered to a close.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Passed in 1882, it placed a 10-year moratorium on Chinese immigration, but sporadic anti-Chinese violence continued. White people don't like us smh

Thaddeus Stevens

Radical Republican leader who proposed confiscation of large Confederate estates to "humble the proud traitors" and to provide land for the former slaves. He hoped to create a new class of self-sufficient African-American yeomen farmers. Because political independence rests on economic independence, he contended, land grants would be far more valuable to Blacks than the vote.

Spirituals

Religious songs sang by blacks. Its is shrouded in obscurity, but it is clear that by 1820 blacks at camp meetings had improvised what one white described as "short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers lengthened out with long repetition choruses."

Charles Sumner

Republican senator of Massachusetts delivered a wrathful speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," in which he verbally lashed the Senate for its complicity in slavery. The speech stunned the Senate. Two days later Democratic representative Preston Brooks strode into the Senate chamber and beat him with a cane.

Andrew Johnson

Self-educated, an ardent Jacksonian, a foe of the planter class, and a supporter of emancipation. A lifelong Democrat, he was the President during Reconstruction. He vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau, the Civil Rights Act, and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, all of which were overturned by Congress. Although he was a Republican, he vetoed a bunch of Republican stuff such as the civil rights act which pissed them off enough that they tried to impeach him through the tenure of office act (and his subsequent violation of it) but the prosecutors ruled him not guilty by one vote.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Signed in late May 1854, it shattered the already weakened second party system and triggered renewed sectional strife. Proposed by Stephen A Douglas (1) he proclaimed Missouri Compromise now void superseded by doctrine of popular sovereignty and (2) he agreed to divide the territory where presumably Nebraska would be free soil and Kansas would be open to slavery. Wrecked the Whig party.

Nat Turner

Slave from VA that led group of slaves to kill their slaves holders and families. Turner caught and executed on Nov.11, 1831. Slave states stricter control on slave population ; SLAVE REBELLION INFO - 1831; Slaves wanted freedom; Nat Turner saw "vision" and attacked whites in Southampton County, VA;Turner, 70 slaves, & 55 whites killed; Turner caught; he was executed & hundreds of slaves were punished; Frightened South; Tightened slave codes; Restricted freedom for all blacks in South; South began to aggressively defend slavery as "positive good"

Mission system

Spanish realized that the key to controlling their frontier provinces lay in promoting settlement there by Spanish-speaking people. Thus they built these along the California coast. They combined political, economic, and religious goals. Declined in late 1820s.

Freedmen's Bureau

Staffed mainly by army officers, the bureau provided relief, rations, and medical care; built schools for former slaves; put them to work on abandoned or confiscated lands; and tried to protect their rights as laborers. Extension of its life Vetoed by President Andrew Johnson but overrode by Congress.

Freeport doctrine

Stephen Douglas's idea that although the Supreme Court had ruled that Congress could not exclude slavery from the territories, the voters in a territory could do so by refusing to enact laws that gave legal protection to slave property. This statement salvaged popular sovereignty.

Wilmot Proviso

Stipulated that slavery be prohibited in any territory acquired by the negotiations with Mexico. Polk and southern democrats opposed it.

Enforcement Acts

The First protected African-American voters. The Second provided for federal supervision of southern elections, and the Third (also known as the KKK Act) authorized the use of federal troops and the suspension of habeas corpus.

Barrios

The collapse of the ranch economy forced many californios (Spanish-speaking descendants of the original Spanish and Mexican settlers) to retreat into these socially segregated urban neighborhoods.

James K Polk

The first "dark-horse" nominee in American history. Democratic party turned to him for the Election of 1844. Little known outside the South, he supported the immediate reannexation of Texas. He followed Old Hickory's lead so often that he became known as Young Hickory.

Gabriel Prosser

The first armed rebellion was organized by this man and 50 other slaves living near Richmond, VA. Hundreds of slaves heard about the plan, and 2 of them told the white authorities. Governor James Monroe called out the militia and Prosser and 25 of his followers were executed and their owners received compensation. Black resistance to enslavement played an important role in fashioning a compromise to the sectional controversy of 1850

Robert E Lee

The general that commanded the Confederate's Army of Northern Virginia. An opponent of secession, a man so courteous that he seemed almost too gentle, but was bold and willing to accept casualties. Led Confederates in the Seven Days Battles and Battle of Antietam.

American Federation of Labor

The most successful late-19th-century labor movement. It was an amalgamation of powerful craft unions that represented only a fraction of the labor force. It advocated an 8-hour workday, employers' liability, and mine-safety laws.

Stephen F Austin

The most successful of the empresarios who brought 300 families into Texas by 1825. Aided Mexico in crushing Haden Edwards' revolt in Texas.

Panic of 1873

The railroad boom led entrepreneurs to overspeculate, with drastic results. A Philadelphia banker, Jay Cooke, who controlled the Northern Pacific and the largest bank in the nation shut them down and led to the stock market crash. It plunged the nation into a five year depression. Unemployment had risen to more than 3 million.

Manifest Destiny

The surging popular sentiment for expansion reflected a growing conviction that it was America's natural destiny to expand into Texas and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. John L O'Sullivan supplied the phrase. Advocates of it used lofty language and invoked God and nature to justify expansion.

Plantation System

The system used in the south that allowed for the rich of the south to have many slaves, and kept the poor the same way. A class system that did not allow for movement between classes

Personal-liberty laws

These hindered state officials' enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Northerners devised ways to interfere with the enforcement.

Radical Republicans

These people in Congress during Reconstruction wanted a slower readmission process that would exclude even more ex-Confederates from political life.

National Bank Act

This allowed banks to obtain federal charters and to issue national bank notes (backed by the federal government).

Fugitive Slave Act

This denied alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury, forbade them to testify at their own trial, permitted their return to slavery merely on the testimony of a claimant, and enabled court-appointed commissioners to collect ten dollars if they ruled for the slaveholder but only five if they ruled for the fugitive.

American or Know-Nothing party

This evolved out of a nativist organization, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. It had pressured existing parties to nominate and appoint only native-born Protestants. It had also urged lengthening the naturalization period before immigrants could vote. An obsessive fear of conspiracies unified them.

The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862

This had paved the way for railroad construction. It used immigrant labor: Chinese works blasted through solid rock in Sierra Nevada, while Irish dug their way across NE and WY. The railroads acquired millions of acres of public land and became the largest landholders in the West under this act.

Reconstruction Act of 1867

This invalidated the states governments formed under the Lincoln and Johnson plans. The new law divided the other ten former Confederate states into 5 military districts. It provided that voters--all black men, plus whites not disqualified by the 14th amendment--could elect delegates who would write a new state constitution granting black suffrage. After congressional approval of the state constitution and ratification of the 14th amendment, Congress would readmit the state into the Union.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

This made African-American U.S. citizens with the same civil rights as other citizens and authorized federal intervention to ensure African-Americans' rights in court. President Johnson vetoed this but Congress overrode his veto.

Morrill Land Grant Act

To bring higher education within the reach of the common people this was created to give states proceeds from public land to establish universities emphasizing "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts [engineering]."

The overland trail

Trails bound for California or Oregon, they were hard to follow and too often marked by the debris of broken wagons. The Donnor Party got stranded on this. Emigrants met the challenges of this by close cooperation with one another, traveling in huge wagon trains rather than alone.

Webster-Ashburton Treaty

Treaty with Great Britain over the long-festering dispute over the Maine-Canadian border. President Tyler wanting a second term reasoned that if he could follow the treaty with the annexation of Texas, he could build a national following.

Sharecropping system

Under this system, landowners subdivided large plantations into farms of 30 to 50 acres and rented them to freedmen under annual leases for a share of the crop, usually one-half. Freedmen liked this decentralized system, which let them use the labor of family members and represented a step toward independence. In effect this helped to preserve the planter elite by keeping blacks in debt.

Harriet Tubman

United States abolitionist born a slave on a plantation in Maryland and became a famous conductor on the Underground Railroad leading other slaves to freedom in the North (1820-1913)

Upper South and Lower South

Upper South - The region of the South consisting of the states of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Kentucky. They had a more diversified economy than the Lower South's states and practiced a more paternalistic kind of slavery, but increasingly sold their slaves "down the river" to the Lower South, where cotton production was booming ; Lower South - agriculture included sugar and cotton. Very focused ; deep south - It was previously called the "lower South." It is where cotton was most dominant. It was also called the "Cotton Kingdom." Thousands of white people came hoping to become wealthy via cotton planting

National Labor Union

William H. Sylvis called a convention that formed this. It embraced an eight-hour workday, currency and banking reform, an end to convict labor, a federal department of labor, and restrictions on immigration, particularly of Chinese. It also endorsed the cause of working women and elected the head of a union of female laundry workers as one of its national officers. Sylvis's sudden death shattered this and it disintegrated.

Free Southern Blacks

free Blacks in the South numbered about 250,000, many owned property-few owned slaves themselves, free Blacks prohibited from working certain occupations & couldn't testify against whites in court, Northern Blacks were especially hated by the Irish-competed for jobs

Denmark Vesey

free slave in South Carolina; a mulatto who inspired a group of slaves to seize Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, but one of them betrayed him and he and his thirty-seven followers were hanged before the revolt started